Holding Up the Universe(27)

I knock on the door of Marcus’s room and then walk on in. His walls are covered with posters—mostly of basketball players. There’s a hoop attached to the closet door. A gangly, shaggy-haired kid hunches on the floor in front of his computer. He’s playing a video game—the shoot-everyone-and-blow-shit-up kind.

I do what I usually do—look for the signs that this is my brother. The pointy chin, the messy hair, the mopey expression. I look for the pieces and put them together because this is how I know it’s him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What?” He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen.

“How do you remember people so well? How do you tell them apart?”

“What?”

“Take Squinty.”

“Her name’s Patrice.”

“Whatever. Patrice. How do you pick her out of a crowd?”

“She’s my girlfriend.”

“I know she’s your girlfriend.”

“Do you know what she’d do to me if I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd?”

“Yeah, but what is it about her that tells you it’s her?”

He pauses the game. Stares at me for, like, a whole minute. “I just look at her. I just know. What’s wrong with you? Have you gone crazy?”

My eyes move past him to the walls of basketball players. I want to ask if he can tell them apart without their jersey numbers or names on the back. When I look at him again, he’s still staring at me, only his features have shifted so that he’s brand-new. I say, “Never mind. I’m just messing with you.”

I go back into my room and dig out the old composition notebook I keep hidden away in a drawer and start flipping through it. This is where I sort out the projects I build—drawing them, planning them out. But in between the brainstorms and sketches and blueprints and lists of materials needed, there are passages like these:

Went to Clara’s Pizza with the family. Got lost coming back from bathroom. Took me a while to find them. Dad finally had to wave me down.

I was so wiped out after Saturday’s game (we won in straight innings) I didn’t even recognize Damario Raines when he came up to congratulate me.



Every few pages, entry after entry. Nothing earth-shattering or alarming until you start adding them up. As I’m reading them now, a feeling settles over me like a blanket, but not the warm, comforting kind. More like a thick and scratchy blanket thrown over the head just before you’re shoved into the trunk of a car.

There is something wrong with me.

Of all the people in the world, I feel like the girl would understand. I sit there the rest of the night thinking, I hope she makes it. And even though the news is protecting her identity, and all I know is her last name, I write her a letter to tell her this, tuck it into her favorite book, and go online to find the mailing address for the local hospital.





Dr. Weiss is thin and tall and probably couldn’t gain weight if he tried. He’s worried I’m trying to kill myself. I tell him, “If I wanted to kill myself, there are faster ways to do it.”

He stands beside my hospital bed with his arms crossed. His face is hard to read because he does this thing where he can frown and smile at the same time. He says, “Your father says you’ve been housebound for six months.”

“It depends on when you start counting. For five months and twenty-four days, I’ve been too large to get through the door. But my last day of school was two years ago.”

“There are two important things we need to understand here: why you had this panic attack and why you gained the weight. That’s what we need to address. It will be a process and it will take time, but we are going to get you healthy again.”

I glance at my dad, in the armchair across from me. He knows as well as I do what the Why is. It’s everything changing when I was ten. It’s the bullying and the fear. So much fear of everything, but mostly death. Sudden, out-of-the-blue death. It’s also me being terrified of life. It’s the giant emptiness in my chest. It’s touching my face or my skin and feeling nothing. This is the Why of me staying home in the first place. And the Why of me eating. And the Why of me ending up here. But that doesn’t mean I want to die.

On the day before I leave the hospital, the nurse brings me a package, no return address. Most everyone else is sending me letters, not packages, which is the only reason I open it. That and the fact that my dad isn’t here to take it away before I can.

Inside is a handwritten note without a name or signature, and a copy of my favorite book. One of my actual very own copies of my favorite book, with my initials on the cover and my highlights throughout.

I thought you might want this. Unlike the other letters, this one is nice. I want you to know I’m rooting for you. For the first time in a long time, I touch my skin and feel something.

When Rachel Mendes—tutor and caregiver—arrives, I lay the book down and tell her the thing I’ve been wanting to say but no one will hear. I pull up one of the news articles on my new phone, my first phone, the one my dad bought me so I can call him if I need anything.

I enlarge the picture of me, taken the day I was rescued from our house. “This girl,” I tell Rachel. “That’s not what I look like. That’s not who I am.” I have a feeling Rachel will get this because she pretended to be straight all through high school, even though she figured out she was a lesbian when she was in eighth grade.